These Are My Kids – Facebook Q&A with Michael Fergusson and Paul Prescod (Kinzin)

Welcome back to the Facebook Demo Q&A Series. Today let’s welcome Michael Fergusson and Paul Prescod talking about “These Are My Kids” – the 2nd and latest Facebook application from Kinzin following the “Are You Normal?” hit that celebrated 1,000,000 Facebookers served sometime last year.

Viewers never need to sign up for anything, but if they are already Facebook users, they can take advantage of Facebook’s existing infrastructure of invitations and notifications.

You need to have a lot of extra capacity available because the traffic can come in waves depending on how you are ranked in the application directory. The safest way to be ready for extra capacity is to use load balancing, memcached and carefully selected database indexes.

Q: Can you tell us a little bit about your new These Are My Kids application on Facebook?

Michael Fergusson: You’re tired of publishing the same photos in five different places to try and please everybody, and they don’t want to sign up, create accounts, or remember passwords to make things easier for you. You’ve come to the right place: These Are My Kids solves this problem perfectly. It’s the easiest way to privately share pictures and stories about your kids with close friends and family.

Primary benefits:

Easy for them: they never need to sign up for anything, or create an account – they don’t even need to belong to Facebook. Your invitation is all they need to see the pictures you’ve shared with them.

Simple for you: No more copying from place to place, email attachments, or tech support calls from Mom. Add your photos once to These Are My Kids, and they get delivered safely to all your loved ones, whether they use Facebook, email only, or even (coming soon!) don’t use a computer at all.

Beautiful and Fun: Don’t just dump your photos into a boring list. Create beautiful “books” and profile pages for your kids that are a joy to view (only you need to know how easy it was). Your loved ones and browse and comment to their heart’s content.

Private: You can be confident that only the people you’ve explicitly invited have access to your content.

Q: What’s the Facebook advantage? How does These Are My Kids tap into Facebook’s social network and circle of friends? How do you keep Facebookers engaged?

Michael Fergusson:

• We enhance Facebook with tools optimized for family-oriented, multi-generational social networking. We can do this without diminishing the value of Facebook as a “peer-oriented” social networking environment.
• The majority of content creators are already using Facebook. It doesn’t make sense to push them somewhere else. They can stay in Facebook and leverage the tools there.
• Viewers never need to sign up for anything, but if they are already Facebook users, they can take advantage of Facebook’s existing infrastructure of invitations and notifications.
• Virtually all Facebook users will have family with whom they wish to network but who haven’t yet joined a social network. We give them an easy on-ramp to get started with social networking, without needing to swallow the whole pill at once.
• More than just becoming viral among Facebook users, we’ll also become viral among parents and grandparents who are not current users of social networking systems. We’ll give them an easy onramp, and a clear reason to join (to create and share books of their own).

Q: Any tips or tricks you can share about developing a Facebook app using Ruby on Rails?

Paul Prescod: You need to have a lot of extra capacity available because the traffic can come in waves depending on how you are ranked in the application directory. The safest way to be ready for extra capacity is to use load balancing, memcached and carefully selected database indexes.

Q: Any lessons you have learned? Any new tips, tricks or advice you can share on developing, designing or marketing Kinzin’s 2nd Facebook app after the “Are You Normal?” hit?

Michael Fergusson: “Are You Normal?” isn’t designed to be a place you spend tons of time. It’s a place that entertains you for a while, and leaves you somewhere that’s interesting, so you can continue your journey (and hopefully come back soon). If your app is a cul-de-sac, it’s much more likely your users won’t come back.

Aesthetics matter. A lot.

Thanks Michael Fergusson and Paul Prescod for your time.

Join us for Vancouver’s 2nd Facebook Developer (& Designer) Garage and 1st in the new year for a live “These Are My Kids” demo and Q&A at the Vancouver Film School Theatre.